This thread is where we discuss what matters of fact we have to take 'on faith'.

It is specifically focussed on 'toers' and 'bangers'. So demanding evidence from 'the other side' is not on topic.

What I'm hoping to see here is a little intellectual modesty. I don't understand quantum physics, so I have to rely on my faith in the skills of the physicist. That kind of thing.

Those on the opposite side from 'toers and bangers'- are allowed to demand evidence and explanations, as it is their 'job' to try and show where faith enters into the decision to accept a certain belief.

Some people seem to think that we might be taking the consideration of light as both a wave and a particle on faith. I actually sat through a physics lecture in college where the professor demonstrated the two-slit experiment with both water* and light. It was really awesome to see and very convincing. Since I was convinced, I would say that I'm not taking it on faith.

*it was actually a really cool aparatus with a water bath that was put on an overhead projector so we could all get a top-down view of the water waves going throught the slits

For those who know nothing about it, here is a really good animated video that explains its very simply in 5 minutes:

When you shoot waves through two side-by-side slits, you get a diffraction pattern because of constructive and destructive interference (if two peaks line up you get a bigger peak but if a peak lines up with a valley they cancel each other out). Here's a gif on that:

You'll get that pattern if you do it in a bath with water and you get that patter if you do it with light. Both water and light travel in waves.

Now, here's the funky part. We also know that light can be quantized as a photon. When a single electron moves from a higher energy shell to a lower one, a single photon of light is emitted. The double-slit experiment is actually done with electons rather than photons, but they both propogate in the same way. They have emitters that can emit a single electron at a time. So even when its gets one electron at a time, you still get that same diffraction pattern that you'd get from a wave. If electrons were like mini tennis balls, then you the patter you'd get would just match the two slits instead of showing the diffraction pattern.

It gets even crazier than that, because when a single electron is approaching the slits, you'd think it have to go through just one of them. But how does it know that there's another slit right next to the one its going through!?

Some people seem to think that we might be taking the consideration of light as both a wave and a particle on faith. I actually sat through a physics lecture in college where the professor demonstrated the two-slit experiment with both water* and light. It was really awesome to see and very convincing. Since I was convinced, I would say that I'm not taking it on faith.

Quite right. We do not say that light acts like a wave because of faith, but because of observations.

Even more, scientists have done experiments meant to detect the luminiferous ether, the supposed medium needed for light to propogate. Scientists were actually completely surprised that they got a negative result:

The lack of an ether is not a product of faith. Quite the opposite. The original belief in the ether was based on faith. The experimental results, the actual facts of the universe, demonstrate that there is no ether.

If those who attack science actually understood the history of scientific discoveries they may not be making these claims about science being based on faith.

Most types of waves cannot propagate without a medium because their oscillations require a medium to support them. Of course variations in electric field strength and magnetic field strength don't require a medium which opens the possibility that a wave made of electric and magnetic fields will behave differently than does a sound wave. It's no surprise that pressure waves require a medium to pressurize or that water waves require water.

Here is a sketch of how an electromagnetic wave can propagate without a medium. Electromagnetic radiation is different from the other types of waves mentioned above in that two different types of vibration are involved. It turns out that a time varying magnetic field produces a time varying electric field and that a time varying electric field generates a time varying magnetic field.

We also know that no medium is required to support either a magnetic field or an electric field.

So getting an electro-magnetic wave started simply requires generating one or the other time varying field. One simple way to to this is to simply jiggle an electrical charge up and down. The jiggled charge generates an electric field even in free space, which in turn generates the magnetic field displaced in space from the electric field. (All as required by Maxwell's equations) No medium is required to support either field in empty space.

Another way of viewing things is that a sound wave propagates a displacement of the medium from one point to another, and accordingly must use a medium. For E&M radiation, what is propagates is the amplitude of the E&M field rather than any physical displacement of any medium. No medium is required for either a static or a time varying magnetic or electric field to exist in space. Based on this difference, there is no reason why light should require a medium simply because we choose to call the oscillating fields a wave.

quote:Electromagnetic radiation is a particular form of the more general electromagnetic field (EM field), which is produced by moving charges. Electromagnetic radiation is associated with EM fields that are far enough away from the moving charges that produced them, that absorption of the EM radiation no longer affects the behavior of these moving charges. These two types or behaviors of EM field are sometimes referred to as the near and far field. In this language, EMR is merely another name for the far-field. Charges and currents directly produce the near-field. However, charges and currents produce EMR only indirectly—rather, in EMR, both the magnetic and electric fields are produced by changes in the other type of field, not directly by charges and currents. This close relationship causes the electric and magnetic fields in EMR to stand in a fixed ratio of strengths to each other, and to be found in phase, with maxima and nodes in each found at the same places in space.

Added by Edit:

We also have experimental evidence (for example the Michelson-Morley experiment) which pretty much demolishes the 'ether' theory. Which brings me to a final point. When science is taught in a university, it is not the case that facts are presented to be accepted without question. What is also presented are alternate attempted explanations along with the reasons why those previous attempts were abandoned. We know that attempts to explain the photo electric effect, and the observed spectrum of black body radiation without quantization were utter failures.

Edited by NoNukes, : Reword.

Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.

Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also in prison. Thoreau: Civil Disobedience (1846)

The apathy of the people is enough to make every statue leap from its pedestal and hasten the resurrection of the dead. William Lloyd Garrison.

If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning. Frederick Douglass

Irrelevant, Vatican. You can always measure a positive value when you believe your prayers are answered. All you need is an explanatory framework to demonstrate you are special. And you can make a graph and show that to the skeptics.Explains nothing in real terms though. Impossible and contradictory assumptions. You are not special and you do not represent any science.

Whereas Bill Gaede explains while assuming only what is physically possible, conceivable without contradictions and therefore could be necessary. He assumes Mach's principle which is already necessary with no single bit matter being able to be created or destroyed and all matter being in constant interaction and the degree of that interaction is a function of distance, and he conceptualises a plausible mechanism of that necessary state of universal play. Gives the physical architecture to Mach's sound principle. Waves are waving in the hypothesis not by magic but through a plausible medium of electromagnetic ropes connecting all bits of matter in existence and of necessity eternally configured to be in tension. That tension of taut ropes is conceptualised as gravity while the speed of light signal travelling along the threads as the rest of the causal interaction.Vast difference next to your ridiculous faith. Lots of phenomena are stripped of their weirdness, quantum or otherwise. Any mathematician can translate any of this into lovely measurements and nice graphs. Now he offers his rational explanation to you and is met with a heap of abuse, which is a natural reaction on your part. Since rational explanations are the last thing you want needing only the comfort of certainty your stupid bigbangist faith is giving you being currently voted up by the majority. No wonder he is enraged at you piggish lot and is mercilessly mocking your whole idiotic peer-review set-up and so on.

I remember my science book in the 8th grade. My friends and I would point to the various transitions of man from ape and try to figure out which one we looked liked the most. During the 70s our science books indoctrinated us into the theory of evolution. I wasn't a Christian and had no other perspective. So I sucked it up. We began with something like primordial ooze, life beginning, then apes, eventually man. That's how evolution was presented in American public schools. . . . Evolution itself has morphed in meaning.

No, the meaning of evolution has not morphed. At least not among scientists. Yes, their knowledge and understanding of evolution has continued to be developed and refined, but the basic idea of what evolution is and how it works had not changed. The problem you encountered is a fundamental problem in science education: primary and secondary grade textbooks are not written by scientists, but rather by professional textbook writers, and as a result the science in the science textbooks is commonly quite awful and filled with errors and misinformation.

In the 1980's and 1990's, William J. Bennetta was involved in reviewing textbooks as part of The Textbook League -- while Wikipedia does not have an article on The Textbook League itself, reference to them is made frequently in articles on the textbooks they had reviewed. They seem to have been inactive for over a decade now and their website appears to have archived though it still can be reached at its old URL, http://www.textbookleague.org/, which provides a link to their index at http://www.textbookleague.org/ttlindex.htm. They reviewed not only science textbooks, but also history (appropriate with the right-wing push for historical revision), health, and even driver's education. One publisher that seems to keep coming up as sub-standard is Glencoe.

I became aware of Bennetta in the late 1980's in connection to the California State Board of Education (CSBoE) choosing a new biology textbook for the public schools. Bennetta was able to get a board of scientists to review the textbooks under consideration. They found none of the candidates to be acceptable since they were filled with inaccuracies, misconceptions, and just plain wrong information. There was only one book that was a little less bad than the rest and the scientists drew up a long list of corrections that had to be made to that book before it could even begin to become acceptable. Bennetta submitted their findings to the CSBoE along with that list of necessary corrections. The CSBoE got the publisher of that book to make a few of the corrections and then approved that book without informing Bennetta, basically going behind the scientists' backs to provide the students of California with a substandard biology textbook filled with misinformation and misconceptions.

So what you had gotten in your school books were what the professional textbook writer misunderstood evolution to be, not what scientists knew it to be. And the situation was undoubtedly made worse by that profession's history with evolution and with decades of appeasing the anti-evolution movement.

My church (UU) had informal "early bird" meetings before Sunday services in which a member or guest would offer an informal presentation on a topic of interest. At http://cre-ev.dwise1.net/EarlyBird.html, I've posted the hand-out to my presentation on "creation science" given around 2000. I refer you to it for the history of evolutionary thought and of the anti-evolution movement in the USA and so that I can keep this little history lesson brief.

The anti-evolution movement grew in the post-WWI era and reached its peak in the early 1920's at which time four states passed their "monkey laws"; it was an ACLU attempt to challenge the Tennessee law, the Butler Act, which resulted in the famous "Scopes Trial", though it never made it to the US Supreme Court because a lower appeals court overturned Scopes' conviction on a legal technicality. As a result, those "monkey laws" remained in effect until Epperson vs Arkansas (1968), which prompted the anti-evolution movement to create their "creation science" legal deception.

Now, just because only four states had these "monkey laws" doesn't mean that the other 44 states weren't also affected. For four decades anti-evolution forces also kept pressure on state and local school boards, teachers, and textbook publishers to keep evolution out of the schools. This is that long history I referred to of textbook publishers and writers being careful to appease special-interest groups such as the anti-evolution movement. And it should be noted that anti-evolution movement continues to use those same tactics on the local level today.

As I recall about the "monkey laws", they not only prohibited the teaching of evolution in the public school classroom, but in some of them even the mere mention of the word would be a violation of the law. And the penalty for violating the law could include dismissal, loss of one's teaching credential, or even being barred for life from ever teaching again. I'm not sure about the other states' "monkey laws", but I do distinctly remember that Arkansas' "monkey law" required being barred for life from teaching for even uttering the word "evolution" to a class. That is what biology teacher Susan Epperson in Little Rock faced because of a sneak-path side-effect from the textbook publishers.

In 1957, Sputnik caught us by surprise. You keep calling yourself "old", but do you remember the Cold War when it was a daily part of our lives? I mean "Atomic Cafe" stuff like "duck and cover" and nuclear war response drills in the classroom (in one class, I was the curtain monitor and it was my duty to close the curtains so that the flying shards of glass from the shock wave hitting the windows wouldn't CuisineArt us all to death) and the weekly testing of the Civil Defense sirens. In that environment, Sputnik exposed us as being behind the Soviets in rocket science (rockets being a choice delivery system for strategic nuclear weapons) and galvanized us into action to close that gap. Part of that action was to push for better math and science education, which included improved textbooks, textbooks to be written by the scientists themselves.

And that did it! Biology is one of the sciences and so actual biologists got involved in writing the new textbooks, resulting in the Biological Sciences Curriculum Study (BSCS) textbooks. And since evolution is a cornerstone of biology, the BSCS textbooks were of course filled with evolution. And Epperson's school board bought the new BSCS textbooks and mandated their use in the biology classroom. And Susan Epperson found herself caught in the middle: if she used the new textbook then she would be fired and barred from the teaching profession for life, but if she disobeyed her boss by not using the new textbook then she would be fired anyway. So she sued the state over its "monkey law", the case worked its way up through the court system, and in 1968 the US Supreme Court struck down the Arkansas "monkey law" as unconstitutional (Epperson v Arkansas) and the other "monkey laws" quickly suffered the same fate ... forty years too late! And the anti-evolution movement, suddenly deprived of their primary tool and suddenly unable to propose any anti-evolution laws because of their real motivation (purely religious) now had to practice deception and pretend that they were actually opposing science for purely scientific reasons, and so they created "creation science" by superficially scrubbing overly overt religious wording in their materials (AKA "the game of 'Hide the Bible'"). Which was exposed to the court system as being purely religious by Edwards v. Aguillard (1987) (though actually early by a lower-court decision against the Arkansas "balanced treatment law", Act 590, in 1981 (McLean v. Arkansas)), so they superficially changed their materials again replacing "creation science" with "intelligent design" (ie, changing the game to "Hide the Creationism"), which was in turn exposed for what it really is in Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District (2005). And we're not yet sure what the anti-evolution movement's next move is. After the public humilation of the Scope's Trial, they pretty much slinked back into the shadows to work at the grass-roots level. They seem to be doing the same again, though it's hard to tell since fundamentalists have also become much more active politically since the 1980's.

So the bottom line here is that (unless yours was a rare exception) biologists didn't write your jr. & sr. high biology textbooks, but rather professional writers did, writers lacking sufficient understanding of the science they were writing about and with a history of not always writing the truth even when they did know better. Evolution didn't change much nor did scientists' understanding of it, outside of their learning more and improving their understanding of it through research. What you were learning in school did not reflect what scientists knew and thought, but rather you were learning misconceptions from the writers' misunderstanding or self-imposed censorship.

However, this also indicates that creationists' distorted misrepresentations of are very likely not of creationist manufacture, but rather are based on the misconceptions that they had been mis-taught in school. Though once they have been taught the truth, it is still their fault when they continue to use the misrepresentations. For example, a local creationist activist uses the gross misrepresentation of punctuated equilibria as "the hopeful monster" in which a lizard lays an egg and a bird hatches from it. In our email correspondence, I requested that he explain to me how he understood punctuated equilibria to work. He responded with a very good and accurate description, which demonstrated to me that he did understand it very well. But then he continued to present the gross misrepresentation that he knew full well was wrong, thus demonstrating that he had no scruples about deliberately lying to his public.

The hard evidence consisted of various bone fragments and chips. Of course all of the evidence at that time could be placed on top of your desk. Not very scientific.

That's an example of quote-mining. In a refutation of that quote, it was stated that rather the physical evidence at that time would completely fill in a baseball diamond. Now it is incumbent on both of us to provide our sources. Where did you hear that claim? And I would need to try to track down that refutation, which I admit will be quite difficult. Though if given your source's source, my task should be more doable.

During the 80's I noticed that the presentation of evolution began evolving. The first one of course is that ToE ignores the primordial ooze bit and begins with hypothetical 1st life form. ( I refer to that as protobug above...my word). Another change that happened was the differentiation on a widescale of microevolution and macroevolution.

Its important to understand that the debate changed. I must admit a lot of the older creationists slowly adjusted to the new rules for debate. Me too!

I think part of what you've seen develop is what non-scientists have been learning through scientists' responses to creationist claims and arguments. Involvement in this "debate" is quite an opportunity for learning. In fact, one professor (David Ruse, I think) said that he enjoys participating in the debates because the audience is actually interested in what he's saying, unlike the sea of bored faces in his class when he gives the same lectures.

So, abiogenesis moved outside the purview of evolution.

I don't think it was ever there. Evolution requires some form of reproduction or replication to work. Abiogenesis doesn't provide that vital element, as far as we know. Whatever abiogenesis does and produces doesn't even begin to involve evolution until a mechanism for reproduction/replication arises. It's kind of like iron mining and automobile production; even though the one provides the raw material for the other, they're still two entirely different subjects.

I understand science needs to be broken into smaller buckets as knowledge increases. Now it is no longer an issue for ToE. I suspect that Charlie Darwin might roll over in his grave to know that his "Origin of Species" has nothing to do with the Theory of Evolution.

Huh? What are you talking about there? Please explain.

Evolution itself has morphed in meaning. We were taught over 30 years ago that evolution was ooze to man. Now the term evolution can be applied to random genetic variations within a species.

No, to reiterate, what you were taught over 30 years ago was written by a professional writer whose own scientific knowledge and understanding was questionable at best. Ever since the Grand Synthesis of the 1920's and 1930's, scientists have correctly understood what evolution is and how it operates. The problem is that the scientists weren't allowed to share their knowledge with public school students until the 1960's (remember BSCS and Susan Epperson?) and even after that school boards and textbook publishers have continued to keep the scientists' knowledge away from the students.

Nuke, all you need to do is to explain to yourself what does that "field" means in real physical terms. Is that a physical object not in need of support by any physical medium, or is that another word for abstract region of Faraday populated by you with lines of forces, tensors, scalars, magnitudes and vectors? What is charge exactly? Can you define it beyond "that mysterious something that attracts or repels depending on the mutual sign I put on my piece of paper?If the latter is the case, then again: impossible and highly irrational proposition.

Vatican, that makes space into a waving ocean of light with photons being water molecules. Is that what you are proposing? The cat is aware though that in the theory, light only arrives and departs as photons while travelling all those quadrillions of intergalactic miles strictly as waves. That makes it an ocean stripped of water molecules. Quite a dry affair.

No, the original belief in ether was based on strict necessity and sound understanding that wave is a verb for the purposes of physics, not any noun representing a physical entity. Wave is what something does. Wave is a changing shape of a medium in a particular type of motion. No exceptions, sorry. Waving fields of electromagnetic radiation is a metaphor like waves of anger or new wave in music. The angry or music playing folks are implied to really exist. The concept of ether itself was contradictory but that is another issue.

You can always measure a positive value when you believe your prayers are answered. All you need is an explanatory framework to demonstrate you are special. And you can make a graph and show that to the skeptics.

Are you saying that scientists are not really measuring those things? Do you really think they're just lying?

That's just not true. They really are measuring something and it really is real.

Whereas Bill Gaede explains while assuming only what is physically possible,

And that's why Bill has failed miserably. He's the one who is taking his position on faith. He doesn't have any evidence to back up his claims, he's just created a fun little story that fits along side some phenomenon and remains internally consistant. He's idea is no more supported than The Matrix. That you and him acually believe it has some veracity is what it is to take something on faith. Its just the opposite of when scientists collect data and build a testable hypothesis and work up a theory. How much data has Bill collected? Any at all? I didn't see it. Its all just based on assumptions and semantics.

Waves are waving in the hypothesis not by magic but through a plausible medium of electromagnetic ropes connecting all bits of matter in existence and of necessity eternally configured to be in tension. That tension of taut ropes is conceptualised as gravity while the speed of light signal travelling along the threads as the rest of the causal interaction.

That's all just made-up bullshit. I've seen the difraction pattern from the double slit experiment with my own eyes. Light behaves as a wave.

Vast difference next to your ridiculous faith. Lots of phenomena are stripped of their weirdness, quantum or otherwise. Any mathematician can translate any of this into lovely measurements and nice graphs.

Reality IS weird. The fact that you and Bill want to change reality to fit within what you consider not-weird is an example of how faith gets in the way of science. The fact that science embraces reality despite it being so weird is what makes real science not based on faith.

Now he offers his rational explanation to you and is met with a heap of abuse, which is a natural reaction on your part. Since rational explanations are the last thing you want needing only the comfort of certainty your stupid bigbangist faith is giving you being currently voted up by the majority.

There's been no heap of abuse. You're just lying. And do you really think you're going to get away with lying to US about what WE want? That's rich. You have it totally wrong. Rational explanations are welcomed and certainty offers no comfort whatsoever. You really have no idea what you're making shit up about.

No wonder he is enraged at you piggish lot and is mercilessly mocking your whole idiotic peer-review set-up and so on.

And this is the epitomy of faith. His idea is wrong so he can't convince anyone that its right. So rather than change his idea he attacks everyone else as being against him. That is only possible when dealing with faith, not science.

Vatican, that makes space into a waving ocean of light with photons being water molecules. Is that what you are proposing?

No, the opposite. Photons don't have mass like water molecules do.

The cat is aware though that in the theory, light only arrives and departs as photons while travelling all those quadrillions of intergalactic miles strictly as waves. That makes it an ocean stripped of water molecules. Quite a dry affair.

Yes! You do get it!

The reason it works is because EM waves do NOT require a medium to propogate through. I understand that's counter-intuitive, but the trick is to not let your intuition get in the way of understanding reality. You have to seperate your faith from the science.

I don't think that's quite right.It was based on an hypothesis that happened to explain many of the observed phenomena. But I think most physicists of that era were quite aware that the ether was hypothetical.

I'm not sure where I sit on this one...

I agree with you that that propsing the ether as an explanation doesn't require any faith. But as Taq phrased it, believing in the ether; wouldn't it take some faith to get to the position that it actually does exist?